The president of developer Nihon Falcom, Toshihiro Kondo, recently participated in numerous interviews with multiple outlets.
Various facets of the company’s ongoing creative efforts and some of his personal takes were unveiled in greater limelight.
For instance, an interview with the French outlet
Game Kult confirmed that Falcom only has around 64 or 65 employees. This information was revealed in response to whether the COVID pandemic shifted their operations. The answer was that it did affect Falcom, but now that time has passed, many developers are going into the office more often to work on their projects.
How many people currently work at Falcom? Has COVID changed the headcount and organisation of the company?
At the moment, Falcom consists of approximately 64 or 65 employees. COVID has indeed impacted many Japanese developers, including Falcom. We have, therefore, implemented guidelines allowing remote working. But now that this crisis is behind us, developers need more space and tend to spend much less time at home to progress on their projects.
One of the major subjects discussed in multiple interviews is Falcom’s efforts with speedier localizations. Interestingly, Kondo notes that Falcom is working on catching up with the delay of localized releases from the original Japanese releases. In fact, he specifies that they are now in contact with NISA during game development, enabling faster work and shorter delays.
It seems Falcom has been pushing for Western localisations a bit faster recently, notably for Series Ys (the tenth is releasing in the West only a year after the Japanese release).
Additionally, the Trails in the Sky remake is scheduled for global release in 2025 (a first for Falcom). Can we hope that Falcom will catch up on the delay in localising the Trails series now that the Crossbell arc games (Trails to Azure and Trails from Zero) have been globally released?
Toshihiro Kondo: It is true that until now, there have been many gaps between the Japanese and Western releases. We worked on this a lot. Our partnership with NISA has allowed us to accelerate the process for the Ys and Trails series.
Until now, we had a different process: We would only start discussing with them after the game had been released in Japan, which took a while. Nowadays, we are in contact with NISA far earlier (during development), which allows us to work faster and have shorter delays.
In an interview with
Push Square, Kondo revealed that sales from Asia and the West combined account for about 60% of sales, eclipsing Japan.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, from a pure sales perspective, you’ve reached a point where the combined regions of Asia, and the West as a region, the sales are greater than Japan — about 60% of the overall sales. So, you know, the West has become a market that can’t really be ignored!
For example, nowadays, whenever we release news — even if it’s Japanese news — a lot of times, the very first people to comment on a Tweet or a video are foreign players who aren’t Japanese.
[…]
So, absolutely, the foreign users are very important to the company as a whole, and they are people that we keep in mind as we create the games.
In that same interview with Push Square, NIS America Associate Producer Alan Costa commented that their goal of reducing localization times has evolved into not wanting more than a year between the Japanese and Western releases. Of course, getting that gap even lower would be ideal, too.
For Ys, the gap between the Japanese and Western releases of Ys X: Nordics was around a year, but Costa notes that it would be great if they could reach a six-month gap.
So, we’ve found a way where we’ve really been able to cut this [localisation time] down. The goal right now is, essentially, we want no more than a year between the Japanese release and our release for the Trails games. And if we can continue to get that down even more, we will.
And then for the Ys series too — if you look at the Japanese release for Ys X and then Western release, it’s about a year. But the goal someday is we’d like to get that down as small as possible — and if we could do six months, that’d be great.
So yeah, we’ve definitely figured out, internally, some systems for how we can get cracking on these games as soon as possible, maintain quality, and bring them out as quickly as we can in the West.
Both Costa and Kondo had no comment regarding whether
Kai no Kiseki would be released in the West soon after
Daybreak II.
Lastly, in an in-depth interview with Peter ‘Durante’ Thoman from
RPG Site regarding the PC port of
Ys X: Nordics, he noted improvements that will lead to higher-quality localizations.
Perhaps the biggest change to the workflow overall for this project is that NIS America does their localization programming and integration in-house.
They do this by directly working on our hosted repository, which means that all platforms are much more closely aligned in terms of localization, and can be updated more rapidly – both during QA and afterwards. This is a great improvement going forward, and should lead to faster (as you can already see with Ys X) and higher-quality localizations out of the gate.
The president of developer Nihon Falcom, Toshihiro Kondo, recently participated in numerous interviews with multiple outlets.
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